Bookclub Bitches 11: I am the Messenger and the message is, I suck at endings

For the April edition of Bookclub Bitches, FFJ and I read I am the Messenger by Markus Zuzak. This is one of those books that I was pretty much enjoying in a kind of mindless way until the very end where it pissed me off so much that it made me totally pick apart everything that came before. I am the Messenger is about Ed Kennedy a sort of ne’er do well 19-year-old cab driver somewhere in Australia who inadvertently foils a bank robbery and becomes a local celebrity for about seven minutes. Right about that time Ed gets an ace of diamonds in the mail with three addresses and times scrawled on it. Ed’s job is to figure out what the hell is going on and what the card means. Once he gets through all the diamonds, he gets an ace of spades, then clubs, then hearts, get it? Anyway, the big mystery is who is behind these cards. It’s what draws you through a novel which has a tendency to be a bit sentimental and altogether too sacharine.

Sadly you never really get to know what’s behind Ed’s mystery because the ending totally fucks over the reader in a way that is unforgivable. It’s just bad form to throw the entire believability of your story and get all meta on the last page. It’s shitty and will piss people off. You can imagine how the podcast goes.

1 Comment

When I finished I am the Messenger, I assumed from the picture on the back cover and the description provided that the guy who had been sending Ed all the messages was the author (Markus Zusak.) I mean, he has this folder of character-sketch information on Ed, he toys with different ideas for Ed’s “messages,” and as he leaves Ed’s shack, he scribbles something into his notebook. That’s all stereotypical writer actions.
I thought that although the overall ending was about as cheep as 99 cent cherry red lipstick layered on too thick(“I organized the bank robbery and got that man to rape his wife” please, like any man would agree to going to jail for some useless taxi driver or risk dying or assault charges for the same loser) the message behind it was good. If some story is telling you that people who are the “epitome of ordinariness” can do amazing things, you should help your fellow humans, and make something of your life, how bad can it be?